Houston Harvey flooding

Disaster by choice: The need to create a culture of warning and safety

The tornado, the earthquake, the virus are not to blame for our decisions.

Disasters are not natural. We—humanity and society—create them and we can choose to prevent them.


Stating that natural disasters do not exist because humans cause disasters seems insanely provocative. We witness nature ravaging our lives all the time: from a city underwater after a storm roars off the Atlantic to rows of smouldering houses after a wildfire to the dust rising from the ruins after an earthquake.

How could we withstand the 250 mile per hour winds of a tornado, faster than Japan's bullet trains, or the 2,200ºF temperature of lava, hotter than many potters' kilns? How would we feel if an "expert" lectured to us that it was not nature's fault, as we sifted through the few photos salvaged from the pile of debris that was once our home and our life?

Yet even when we cannot keep our infrastructure standing, we can stop people dying, we can protect our most valuable possessions, and we can learn to deal with devastation. The disaster lies not in the forces unleashed by nature, but in the deaths and injuries, the loss of irreplaceable homes and livelihoods, and the failure to support affected people, so that a short-term interruption becomes a long-term recovery nightmare.

COVID-19 New York City

The New York National Guard loads cars with meals to distribute to those in quarantine due to COVID-19. (Credit: The National Guard)

Even the COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural disaster. We know that new viruses emerge and infect us all the time. We could have improved our monitoring for and response to emerging diseases, which means—at minimum—not silencing and intimidating health professionals who report that something might be happening. And, long before, we must build robust health systems and health coverage, so that countries can be confident of taking care of a sick population. Then follow the long-ago-shelved pandemic plans that would have told the world how to deal with the new coronavirus without it becoming a pandemic forcing so many of us into lockdown for weeks.

The tornado, the earthquake, the virus are not to blame for our decisions.

They are manifestations of nature that have occurred countless times over the aeons of Earth's history. The disaster consists of our inability to deal with them as part of nature. We have the knowledge, ability, technology, and resources to build houses which are not ripped apart by 250 mile per hour winds. If we choose to, we can create a culture with warning and safe sheltering.

Lava at 2,200ºF and a tsunami higher than our building are harder to ride out. But we can shun places likely to be hit by them or we can create a culture that understands and accepts periodic destruction, again with warning and safe evacuation, to permit swift rebuilding afterwards. The baseline is that we have options regarding where we live, how we build, and how we get ourselves ready for living with nature.

Many of the choices we make currently permit death and devastation. They create the conditions for disasters, not nature.

Inequities, underdevelopment, and marginalization

January 12, 2020, marked the tenth anniversary of Haiti's earthquake disaster, killing at least 150,000 people and possibly up to double this number, the vast majority of them poor Haitians living in inadequate constructed dwellings. Yet knowledge of Haitian earthquakes extends back centuries, with many previous earthquakes around the country experienced and recorded.

Despite this knowledge of seismicity, little action was taken.

Why was the infrastructure in and around the capital city so poorly constructed? Why were so many people poor, leaving them with no choice but to live in these buildings without hope of improving them? Why did even many affluent parties, from the country's president to the United Nations to the developers of luxury hotels, not enact basic earthquake safety principles?

These questions were being asked in 2010: a meeting on tackling disasters in Haiti, highlighting seismic safety, was concluding on January 12, 2010, when the earthquake rumbled through.

The overwhelming inequities, underdevelopment, and marginalization precluded a quick fix. Haiti, as a country, is not especially poor or under-resourced, but the scale of inequality is horrifying. Centuries in the making, all these problems could not be easily tackled or solved.

It takes time to put up tens of thousands of buildings that lasted barely a minute on January 12, 2010. It takes time to create a city rife with informal settlements, without basic services, and lacking planning regulations, building codes, and institutions to monitor and enforce such laws.

It takes time to produce a culture of day-to-day bustle across exposed electric wires, through haphazard doorways, and around informal structures. The earthquake lasts seconds, but creating a society accepting infrastructure that cannot withstand earthquakes—creating the vulnerability, which creates the disaster—takes decades and centuries.

Haiti Earthquake 2010

A family awaits treatment at a Red Cross First Aid Post in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. (Credit: American Red Cross)

Human-created vulnerability

Same with the recent bushfires in Australia. The country has good reason to fear such flames. The incongruously named Ash Wednesday fires of February 16, 1983, killed 75 people across two states in 12 hours. Tasmania lost 62 people to the Black Tuesday fires of February 7, 1967.

The most lethal Australian bushfire disaster occurred exactly 42 years later on February 7, 2009, or Black Saturday: 173 people died and 414 were injured.

Indigenous Australians managed fires for tens of thousands of years. They set controlled blazes to alter the environment for maintaining tracks, trapping animals, and avoiding the build-up of burnable fuel that could lead to large conflagrations.

Over time, Indigenous practices adapted the ecosystems to support plant species that could survive low-intensity bushfires, actually using fire to propagate. Fire was part of land use and land management, integrated into human needs among other environmental adjustments, although we do not really know how many fire disasters the Indigenous Australians might have caused nor how many of them perished in the flames.

Europeans imported and imposed a different perspective of bushfires. Flames were presumed always to be dangerous and damaging, so they were suppressed and fought. As settlements expanded into the bush, fires indeed became highly destructive and lethal, reinforcing the combat mode.

The 2020 fires continue this pattern. Despite the heat wave and the fires' intensity and extent, plenty could have been done over the long-term to avoid the witnessed catastrophe. Over past decades, cities and towns have expanded significantly into burnable areas.

Home owners can design and maintain their houses and land to reduce the chance of them catching alight during a bushfire. No guarantees ever exist of saving property, but we have seen the difference in Australia this year between those whose dwellings survived and those who sadly lost everything or who tragically perished while staying behind to defend.

The key is preparing years in advance, including being ready to lose one's home, knowing that fires are part of the ecosystem and could happen any year, even if now being much more intense and expanding in range due to human-caused climate change. The fundamental cause of the Australian bushfire disasters was creating vulnerability to the environment, no matter what the fire hazard does.

Australian wildfires

A firefighter from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management assists with Australian bushfires in January. (Credit: BLMIdaho)

A path forward 

For the environmental events and processes we can deal with by reducing vulnerability, which are most of them, we are the real causes of disasters, not nature. Inadvertently or deliberately, in knowledge or in ignorance, disasters emerge through human choices, actions, behavior, and values. Closing this chasm between what we know and actually using this knowledge is not easy.

Some people aim to change fundamentals, focusing on the big picture in order to overcome baseline causes of vulnerabilities. Discrimination, poverty, inequity, and incompetence feed into disasters.

Others prefer to work on smaller scales and less ambitious steps. They demonstrate more direct, more tangible, and more immediate positive impacts, which they hope, in the end, might scale up to wider, deeper changes. Examples are managing forests to permit small wildfires and retrofitting properties to withstand earthquakes, all while changing our behaviour so that we can withstand wildfires and earthquakes without harm.

One approach never precludes the other. We can practice both together, so that they complement rather than impede each other. After all, chronic human conditions of vulnerability that cause disasters are ever-present, and must be tackled, at all scales, especially over the long term. This means that disasters never manifest rapidly. Rather than an event, we should recognize that a disaster is a long-term process.

Some hazards release their forces and energies swiftly with little specific warning. While we know broadly where earthquakes could strike at any time, such as Haiti and Jamaica, we cannot yet predict that an earthquake will occur in a specific place at a specific time. We know broadly where hurricanes could strike, also including Haiti and Jamaica, and we can observe the progress of a specific hurricane, but we cannot predict beyond a few days in advance when and where a major storm might make landfall. We know that Haiti and Jamaica are vulnerable to earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, epidemics, and many other hazards because of their long-term social inequities and infrastructure inadequacies.

Consequently, in the same way that disasters are not natural, they are not unusual or extreme. They dramatically expose the vulnerabilities with which people live, and are typically forced by others to live, on a daily basis.

We can prevent 'natural disasters' and their human suffering, despite the presence of major environmental hazards, by reducing vulnerabilities. We must actively choose to do so.

Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, England and a Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

This is an adapted excerpt from Disaster by Choice by Ilan Kelman, published by Oxford University Press on May 1, available in hardback and eBook formats.

Banner photo: Texas National Guard soldiers arrive in Houston, Texas, to aid citizens in heavily flooded areas from the storms of Hurricane Harvey. (Credit: The National Guard)

A wooden gavel with an image of a city skyline in the background.
Credit: VBlock/Pixabay

Climate funding frozen by Trump must be released, judge rules in sweeping injunction

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze billions in climate and infrastructure funds that had been paused since January, ruling the freeze unlawful and allowing projects across the country to resume.

Praveena Somasundaram reports for The Washington Post.

Keep reading...Show less
Sunrise in the woods

Get our Good News newsletter

Get the best positive, solutions-oriented stories we've seen on the intersection of our health and environment, FREE every Tuesday in your inbox. Subscribe here today. Keep the change tomorrow.

Image of Ben Franklin from a $100 bill behind a silhouette of an oil pump jack.

California officials vow to extend cap-and-trade as Trump targets climate rules

Gov. Gavin Newsom and top Democratic lawmakers announced plans Tuesday to extend California’s cap-and-trade program, despite opposition from President Trump, who claims state climate policies endanger national security.

Lia Russell reports for The Sacramento Bee.

Keep reading...Show less
Man holding his face close to an oscillating fan during a heatwave.

Heatwave relief at risk as Trump administration layoffs stall $400 million in energy aid

A federal energy assistance program that helps low-income families pay utility bills is in limbo after Trump administration layoffs gutted the office responsible for distributing nearly $400 million in summer heat relief funds.

Nina Lakhani reports for The Guardian.

Keep reading...Show less
View of New York highway along a body of water with the city in the background.

New tolls cut traffic by 82,000 cars a day as New York fights federal order to stop congestion pricing

New York City’s toll program reduced traffic below 60th Street by 13% in March, even as federal officials push to shut it down.

Stephen Nessen reports for Gothamist.

Keep reading...Show less
Three round silos with green grass in the foreground.
Credit: GREGOR/Pixabay

Texas bill would require drillers to notify landowners before burying toxic waste

Texas lawmakers are weighing new rules that would require oil and gas companies to notify and get permission from landowners before burying toxic drilling waste on private property, addressing long-standing complaints over health and environmental risks.

Martha Pskowski reports for Inside Climate News.

Keep reading...Show less
A white and red hydrofoil ferry on the water with distant mountains in background.

Futuristic ferries rise above the waves to offer faster, cleaner commutes

A new generation of electric hydrofoil ferries is cutting travel times and carbon emissions in Stockholm and could soon expand to major cities around the world.

Nicolás Rivero reports for The Washington Post.

Keep reading...Show less
A coal fired energy plant with a wind turbine in the foreground.

Trump pushes coal revival as experts warn cleaner energy is key to grid stability

As electricity demand surges and extreme weather strains the U.S. power grid, the Trump administration is attempting to keep coal plants alive despite expert warnings that clean energy offers a more reliable and cost-effective path forward.

Jeff St. John reports for Canary Media.

Keep reading...Show less
From our Newsroom
Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro speaks with the state flag and American flag behind him.

Two years into his term, has Gov. Shapiro kept his promises to regulate Pennsylvania’s fracking industry?

A new report assesses the administration’s progress and makes new recommendations

silhouette of people holding hands by a lake at sunset

An open letter from EPA staff to the American public

“We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. We need to hold this administration accountable.”

wildfire retardants being sprayed by plane

New evidence links heavy metal pollution with wildfire retardants

“The chemical black box” that blankets wildfire-impacted areas is increasingly under scrutiny.

People  sitting in an outdoors table working on a big sign.

Op-ed: Why funding for the environmental justice movement must be anti-racist

We must prioritize minority-serving institutions, BIPOC-led organizations and researchers to lead environmental justice efforts.

joe biden

Biden finalizes long-awaited hydrogen tax credits ahead of Trump presidency

Responses to the new rules have been mixed, and environmental advocates worry that Trump could undermine them.

Op-ed: Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition

Op-ed: Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition

Prisons, jails and detention centers are placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat are the norm.

Stay informed: sign up for The Daily Climate newsletter
Top news on climate impacts, solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered to your inbox week days.